In two weeks, we're going to face our dream – or our nightmare. That's when we're going to actually start living part-time in our Canadian farmhouse.
The house lies in the far eastern corner of Prince Edward Island in the Canadian Maritimes, about a dozen hours northeast of our house in Massachusetts. We drove past it one day in August – back when there was grass on the ground instead of two feet of snow – and decided to buy it on the spot. The house is a century old and has a sharp peaked roof, like the house that Lucy Maude Montgomery used as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, the island's most famous export other than potatoes. We couldn't get inside the house when we looked at it, but we made an offer anyway, lured by the two barns, an acre of rich farmland, a view of the neighbor's sheep grazing in the fields below, and the red clay road leading to our favorite beach.
My husband Dan and I made the offer by phone – an offer worth less than my brother just paid for his used BMW. We drove back up to the island last October to see the inside of the house with a home inspector, alternating between feeling giddy with excitement and terrified that we were buying a money pit.
We had reason to feel both extremes. Friends who actually live in Canada, and strangers, too, agreed with us that Canada seemed more peaceful and civilized than the U.S. Certainly it's a country less prone to doing things like, say, bombing Libya without a lot of discussion. Others warned us that Canadians want nothing to do with Americans, and reminded us of the blizzards. “Who would want to retire in a place like that instead of Florida?” many asked.
“We would,” we answered.
When we drove up for the home inspection, I was so excited to cross the Confederation Bridge that I leaped out of the car as soon as we stopped – only to have the door of our Honda nearly blow inside out in the wind. My face was needled with freezing rain and my jacket was soaked through in seconds. We had definitely arrived.
We'd arranged to stay in a wonderful B&B in North Lake called Harbour Lights http://www.harbourlightshouse.com To my surprise, the B&B was owned by Americans not unlike ourselves – a couple who had worked until near retirement in the U.S., then decided their hearts belonged on PEI. Bruce and Pat served us a fantastic home-cooked Chinese meal to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, and we invited them to our home inspection the next morning.
The weather was gorgeous that night. We took a sunset walk along North Lake Beach that was doused in brilliant pinks, peaches, blues and plums, the sand glowing gold under our feet as we admired the dunes and fishing boats. It was paradise.
The next day was anything but, with weather that included lashing rain, winds, and freezing temperatures again. To add to our discomfort, the utilities in the house had been shut off for the past year.
We were nervous about what we'd find inside. But, instead of the usual horrors of an old house renovated and ruined, we were amazed to find original woodwork and hardwood floors, century-old charm in every room. The house even came with furniture, much of it antique and appealing as well.
“I could live here,” I thought, despite my chattering teeth, as I stood on the porch and looked at the sheep huddled in the fields below.
The house, in every possible way, called to us. We signed the papers that week, and for months afterward, indulged in looking at photos of the house, imagining what we'd do when we lived there. Raise alpacas? Make cheese? Start an arts cooperative? Keep working as a software consultant and a writer? Anything seemed possible!
And then things intervened, causing our house – and our future – to fade from view, to become a backdrop in front of the frenetic light show that is daily life for working parents everywhere. I have an elderly mother to look after, plus a young son still at home. My husband's company laid off half the employees and left everyone else scrambling to meet deadlines. Our four older children, two of them still in college, came and went over the holidays and spring break. We did the taxes. And, in the cracks between, we did the recycling and grocery shopping, volunteered and had occasional nights out with friends. It's a good life, but the kind of life that leaves you gasping at the end of every day, because you've suffocated yourself with obligations.
Now it's spring again, and it's a shock to think that we're going to start turning our dream life into a reality. In two weeks, we will see if our Canadian house is still standing. Meanwhile, I'm arranging meetings with the electrician, the plumber, the roofer, the mower, the heating guy, the painter...and probably more who I haven't thought of yet. If we can get the house liveable, we'll spend as much time as we can there – two months at least – between now and next Christmas. We want to give our future a true test run.
By the time our kids are all launched, with homes and families of their own, we might live in Canada and perhaps become dual citizens – or just travel between the two countries, with an apartment near our children. Who knows where that will be? Our children are all talking about different states – even different coasts – at the moment.
Are we crazy? Will our lives in Canada be saner, more content, more creative? Or will we just transfer the craziness North, and add more stress to our lives?
There's no way to know for sure, of course. But right now Dan and I are looking at each other across the dining table with a fresh glint in our eyes. We're on a new adventure together – with every reason to look forward to the next chapter of our lives.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Our Muses, Ourselves: Why Women Like Me Run Away From Home
As my friend Susan Straight and I cross the border from Maine into Canada, the customs agent follows the usual script: Where are you going, are you carrying firearms, how long are you staying?
Then he trips me up: “What is the purpose of your visit? Business or pleasure?”
Susan and I glance at each other. Business or pleasure?
I'm not sure.
Susan and I have crossed this border together before. We met in graduate school and have stayed friends despite the fact that I live in Massachusetts and her home is in California. We usually meet in New York when we both have business there. And, for the past decade, Susan has flown east every summer so that we can drive ten hours north from my house to Prince Edward Island.
This year is completely different because we're actually sitting in the same car. On previous trips to Canada, we always brought so many children that we had to caravan in two vans. We have eight kids between us (me, five; her, three). We've also brought stragglers, whenever this child or that one begged to bring a friend. One summer we topped out at ten kids.
Those vacations were fun – endless hours of sand castles and board games – but crammed with chores: cooking and laundry, grocery shopping and vacuuming. Susan is divorced. For understandable reasons, my husband always opted out. So Susan and I were left on our own with the children like some wild combo of Sherpas and camp counselors.
This week, we're traveling to Canada alone in search of our inner muses. We have disguised our sudden decision to have a creative getaway as a janitorial vacation, since we're also opening up our summer cottages – she bought one on Prince Edward Island shortly after I did, and we rent them out to help support costs – but our goal is to devote uninterrupted hours to writing.
This goal makes me feel clammy with guilt. But why should it? I wonder about this as we meander along the Bay of Fundy. Guilt is a useless emotion. Yet I'm prone to it, especially when faced with a choice between what I “should” do and whatever I want to do most – as if doing something that makes me happy will make someone else unhappy.
Oh, wait: Escaping the home front to write does make the people I love unhappy. When I left this morning to pick up Susan at the airport, my husband was griping about having to leave work early to care for our youngest son, who stood with his forlorn face pressed against the door. My four older kids wanted to know if I'll have email and cell service, “just in case.” Even our dogs looked miserable.
As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her timeless book, Gift from the Sea, my husband and children, my mother and friends, my home and pets, my neighbors and coworkers represent “a whole caravan of complications.” Leaving them behind for the sake of creativity makes me feel like I have phantom limbs: I itch all over.
Susan isn't doing much better. Luckily, we have time to talk about this, to shore each other up as we drive north, despite our cell phones singing with alarming regularity as our various children and work colleagues reach out to us through the state of Maine and most of New Brunswick.
Why the guilt? Like most women, Susan and I are people pleasers, willing to charge in to fill the black holes of need around us, even if that means sacrificing the time and concentration we need to be creative. Making art – whether it's music, drawing, dancing or writing – demands full attention and passion, but that ability to focus is easily worn down, especially for women with families.
Especially because, in our culture, art so rarely pays enough to put food on the table. With no money in art except for those lucky few breakout writers and artists, there is no power in doing it. Making art definitely feels like a luxury. Maybe that's because art takes so much time, and it's our precious free time that the people around us want most.
I can feel the hot breaths of everyone I left behind on the back of my neck as I drive.
*
I had imagined us rising early to write. After all, novelist Virginia Woolf proclaimed that every woman needs a room of one's own to do so. But Susan and I are so exhausted by the time we arrive at my house on Prince Edward Island – a modest summer cottage overlooking Malpeque Bay – that we can barely force ourselves out of bed once we have those precious rooms to ourselves.
Instead, we lie in our separate rooms as if we've been clubbed over the head. This isn't exhaustion from the drive; it's more like battle fatigue. Or shell shock: my ears are actually ringing a little. I think it's the silence.
We spend the first day doing chores, like that essential trip to town to replace everything from garbage bags to shower mats. We also go walking. The first day, we traverse the red beach around Darnley basin as if our lives depend upon making it from one end to the other, taking long, purposeful strides, arms pumping.
On the second day, house chores behind us, we take a different sort of walk. This one is a meandering stroll along the shore road that ends at Shipwreck Point. We see people doing more ambitious things: mowing lawns, jogging, carrying groceries into a house. It's almost like watching a movie of real life while we're in motion. We carry no cell phones, no purses. It's just us and the wildflowers and great, billowy white clouds that look like props for a theater piece.
That night, some sort of magic happens. We eat a simple supper of sandwiches and then get to work.
I sit at the little desk in my bedroom overlooking the potato fields and write almost maniacally, churning out sentences which build paragraphs that I might or might not keep. I don't turn out the light until 2 a.m., because there's nothing to stop me: No big kitchen cleanup waiting downstairs, no cell phone service, no email, no cable TV, no husband. Susan sits downstairs editing her new book galleys. We are completely separate, yet it's perfect, since each of us knows that the other is blissfully working.
I have so many good things in my life. Yet being here makes me realize how fractured my life is, with bits of my attention scattered everywhere like pocketfuls of gravel.
How did I let my life get so crowded?
*
Susan's summer house is an hour's drive from mine. One of her tasks is to buy new mattresses for the twin beds, so we track down a place that sells them at discount. We already have a carload of stuff. Still, rather than make another, separate trip to pick up the mattresses and waste valuable writing time, we jam the mattresses into the back of my Honda CRV on top of everything else.
The mattresses are so long that we have to remove the headrests and put our seats all the way forward. I have to keep my neck bent forward toward the dashboard; it's easy to imagine getting decapitated if we stop too suddenly. I do a little praying that the Canadian Mounties won't arrest us for driving with no visibility.
Then I have this comforting thought: This being Canada, the jail cells are probably really, really clean. If I'm locked up, the guards will let me write and I still wouldn't have to dust or cook.
We make it to Susan's house, then spend the rest of the day vacuuming up millions of fly corpses littering the windowsills and clearing out closets. We're both sore and exhausted by the time we finish. It's too late to go out to dinner, so we dine on fried sausages and potatoes. Then I set up my computer in the dining room and write for four hours. I can hear Susan tapping on her laptop in the kitchen. She is an award-winning novelist whose newest novel, Take One Candle Light a Room, is a gem. My memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, was put out in paperback this year. We're pleased to be published in this rocky economy. For us, though, the excitement has always been about the actual writing.
I have never been so content as I am right now. Men have always claimed wives and mistresses as their muses. Susan and I have ourselves and, for this week, we have each other. Are we writing masterpieces? Are we even writing something that other people will ever read?
It doesn't matter. The joy is in the creative act.
Women have always found satisfaction in being helpful. There is joy in that and love, too. Women are also creating some of the most exciting and challenging art today. Yet we still aren't catching up to our male colleagues in the arts. Look at the numbers for everything from cinematography to writing, from painting to conducting music, and men win out every time.
Feminists would probably say that there is a glass ceiling in the arts, as there has been in nearly every other field. I'm certainly a feminist. Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.
Not long after my first two children were born – 16 months apart, so close together that I was in a coma for the first three years of motherhood – I went to a book signing by a famous mystery writer. He mentioned that he, too, had young children, so I eagerly approached him after the event to ask how he managed to find time to write fiction with young children at home.
“I have a wife,” he said.
It's true: Even when women have partners or spouses, our significant others often send messages that they'd rather do something – anything – rather than take over child care and housework. It's easy to rant about this, to say that women's lives would be easier if men did their fair share around the house. However, even when our partners are willing to shoulder domestic duties in equal measure, we often get in our own way by refusing to let them. We want to read that bedtime story. We think we're the only ones who can pack the right school lunch. And we long to be the ones greeting the school bus in the afternoon if we can arrange our work schedules to do so.
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days. And, as the writer Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, genius isn't a matter of genetics, but of opportunities and persistence: He estimates that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at doing something.
Nobody will give us those 10,000 hours. We have to take them for ourselves.
*
At the end of the week, we walk on St. Margaret's Beach. I'm in beachcomber mode, stooping to pick up stones that catch my eye. Susan wants to climb the cliffs. She hikes ahead of me and is soon clambering around on distant rocks, farther than I want to go without any shoes.
When I'm tired of picking up rocks, I decide to return to the car and get my book so that I can read until Susan returns. Then it dawns on me: she has my car keys.
For a moment, I'm irritated – why did she have to disappear like that? – and then I feel helpless. What will I do, all by myself on a beach, without even anything to read?
I sit on a boulder, disgruntled, and pile the rocks I've collected beside me. There's nothing to do but watch the waves wash in and out, frothy and pink on the red sand.
Watch the waves, and think. I remember another book signing I went to a long time ago. This one was by the political activist and short story writer Grace Paley. I asked her the same question that I'd asked the arrogant mystery writer: How did she find time to write with young children at home?
“Day care,” she said. “Don't ever be afraid to pay for writing time.”
Easier said than done. For most women, paying a babysitter so that they can write, paint, make pottery or dance is out of the question. Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce “only” art seems like a foolish decision.
What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority. Even if we aren't making great art, or commercial art, the very act of creating it is a joyful, transformative experience, one where we explore new emotions and perspectives, ideas and values.
I think hard about this while I sit on the beach. I think about the pages I've written this week, too, and about the way my novel is progressing.
And then, after a while, I'm not thinking much at all, just contentedly watching the force of the ocean, and how the waves make the rocks roll around and create such beautiful patterns in the smooth red sand. I build a little pyramid out of the rocks I've collected. I watch some pulpy kelp become draped over a rock, then wash out to sea again. I dig my toes deeper into the sand. I admire the swallows darting in and out of the cliff above me. My mind is clear.
I am just here. I am here, just me. Through writing, I have discovered a wonderfully still place inside me that I've never seen before. It's good to be here.
Eventually, of course, Susan returns from her walk. I write again that night, staying up until well past 2 a.m. solving a particularly vexing dilemma in the plot of my new novel. The images are fresh and there is tension on the page.
The drive back is lovely and uneventful. Our cell phones chorus again in the middle of New Brunswick, and by mid-coast Maine we've talked to all of our children. Everyone has survived.
We reach my house just before nine o'clock. “Well?” my husband asks. “How was it? Did you write anything you can sell?”
“I don't know,” I tell him. “I missed you,” I add.
I toss dirty clothes into the washing machine, clean the kitchen after dinner, check my email, walk the dogs, help my son order new parts for his scooter online. I make a grocery list.
During all of this, I can feel my brain starting to thrum with activity. The still place inside me has disappeared again. But at least I know how to get there, and who to call when I need help on the journey.
Then he trips me up: “What is the purpose of your visit? Business or pleasure?”
Susan and I glance at each other. Business or pleasure?
I'm not sure.
Susan and I have crossed this border together before. We met in graduate school and have stayed friends despite the fact that I live in Massachusetts and her home is in California. We usually meet in New York when we both have business there. And, for the past decade, Susan has flown east every summer so that we can drive ten hours north from my house to Prince Edward Island.
This year is completely different because we're actually sitting in the same car. On previous trips to Canada, we always brought so many children that we had to caravan in two vans. We have eight kids between us (me, five; her, three). We've also brought stragglers, whenever this child or that one begged to bring a friend. One summer we topped out at ten kids.
Those vacations were fun – endless hours of sand castles and board games – but crammed with chores: cooking and laundry, grocery shopping and vacuuming. Susan is divorced. For understandable reasons, my husband always opted out. So Susan and I were left on our own with the children like some wild combo of Sherpas and camp counselors.
This week, we're traveling to Canada alone in search of our inner muses. We have disguised our sudden decision to have a creative getaway as a janitorial vacation, since we're also opening up our summer cottages – she bought one on Prince Edward Island shortly after I did, and we rent them out to help support costs – but our goal is to devote uninterrupted hours to writing.
This goal makes me feel clammy with guilt. But why should it? I wonder about this as we meander along the Bay of Fundy. Guilt is a useless emotion. Yet I'm prone to it, especially when faced with a choice between what I “should” do and whatever I want to do most – as if doing something that makes me happy will make someone else unhappy.
Oh, wait: Escaping the home front to write does make the people I love unhappy. When I left this morning to pick up Susan at the airport, my husband was griping about having to leave work early to care for our youngest son, who stood with his forlorn face pressed against the door. My four older kids wanted to know if I'll have email and cell service, “just in case.” Even our dogs looked miserable.
As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her timeless book, Gift from the Sea, my husband and children, my mother and friends, my home and pets, my neighbors and coworkers represent “a whole caravan of complications.” Leaving them behind for the sake of creativity makes me feel like I have phantom limbs: I itch all over.
Susan isn't doing much better. Luckily, we have time to talk about this, to shore each other up as we drive north, despite our cell phones singing with alarming regularity as our various children and work colleagues reach out to us through the state of Maine and most of New Brunswick.
Why the guilt? Like most women, Susan and I are people pleasers, willing to charge in to fill the black holes of need around us, even if that means sacrificing the time and concentration we need to be creative. Making art – whether it's music, drawing, dancing or writing – demands full attention and passion, but that ability to focus is easily worn down, especially for women with families.
Especially because, in our culture, art so rarely pays enough to put food on the table. With no money in art except for those lucky few breakout writers and artists, there is no power in doing it. Making art definitely feels like a luxury. Maybe that's because art takes so much time, and it's our precious free time that the people around us want most.
I can feel the hot breaths of everyone I left behind on the back of my neck as I drive.
*
I had imagined us rising early to write. After all, novelist Virginia Woolf proclaimed that every woman needs a room of one's own to do so. But Susan and I are so exhausted by the time we arrive at my house on Prince Edward Island – a modest summer cottage overlooking Malpeque Bay – that we can barely force ourselves out of bed once we have those precious rooms to ourselves.
Instead, we lie in our separate rooms as if we've been clubbed over the head. This isn't exhaustion from the drive; it's more like battle fatigue. Or shell shock: my ears are actually ringing a little. I think it's the silence.
We spend the first day doing chores, like that essential trip to town to replace everything from garbage bags to shower mats. We also go walking. The first day, we traverse the red beach around Darnley basin as if our lives depend upon making it from one end to the other, taking long, purposeful strides, arms pumping.
On the second day, house chores behind us, we take a different sort of walk. This one is a meandering stroll along the shore road that ends at Shipwreck Point. We see people doing more ambitious things: mowing lawns, jogging, carrying groceries into a house. It's almost like watching a movie of real life while we're in motion. We carry no cell phones, no purses. It's just us and the wildflowers and great, billowy white clouds that look like props for a theater piece.
That night, some sort of magic happens. We eat a simple supper of sandwiches and then get to work.
I sit at the little desk in my bedroom overlooking the potato fields and write almost maniacally, churning out sentences which build paragraphs that I might or might not keep. I don't turn out the light until 2 a.m., because there's nothing to stop me: No big kitchen cleanup waiting downstairs, no cell phone service, no email, no cable TV, no husband. Susan sits downstairs editing her new book galleys. We are completely separate, yet it's perfect, since each of us knows that the other is blissfully working.
I have so many good things in my life. Yet being here makes me realize how fractured my life is, with bits of my attention scattered everywhere like pocketfuls of gravel.
How did I let my life get so crowded?
*
Susan's summer house is an hour's drive from mine. One of her tasks is to buy new mattresses for the twin beds, so we track down a place that sells them at discount. We already have a carload of stuff. Still, rather than make another, separate trip to pick up the mattresses and waste valuable writing time, we jam the mattresses into the back of my Honda CRV on top of everything else.
The mattresses are so long that we have to remove the headrests and put our seats all the way forward. I have to keep my neck bent forward toward the dashboard; it's easy to imagine getting decapitated if we stop too suddenly. I do a little praying that the Canadian Mounties won't arrest us for driving with no visibility.
Then I have this comforting thought: This being Canada, the jail cells are probably really, really clean. If I'm locked up, the guards will let me write and I still wouldn't have to dust or cook.
We make it to Susan's house, then spend the rest of the day vacuuming up millions of fly corpses littering the windowsills and clearing out closets. We're both sore and exhausted by the time we finish. It's too late to go out to dinner, so we dine on fried sausages and potatoes. Then I set up my computer in the dining room and write for four hours. I can hear Susan tapping on her laptop in the kitchen. She is an award-winning novelist whose newest novel, Take One Candle Light a Room, is a gem. My memoir, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter, was put out in paperback this year. We're pleased to be published in this rocky economy. For us, though, the excitement has always been about the actual writing.
I have never been so content as I am right now. Men have always claimed wives and mistresses as their muses. Susan and I have ourselves and, for this week, we have each other. Are we writing masterpieces? Are we even writing something that other people will ever read?
It doesn't matter. The joy is in the creative act.
Women have always found satisfaction in being helpful. There is joy in that and love, too. Women are also creating some of the most exciting and challenging art today. Yet we still aren't catching up to our male colleagues in the arts. Look at the numbers for everything from cinematography to writing, from painting to conducting music, and men win out every time.
Feminists would probably say that there is a glass ceiling in the arts, as there has been in nearly every other field. I'm certainly a feminist. Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.
Not long after my first two children were born – 16 months apart, so close together that I was in a coma for the first three years of motherhood – I went to a book signing by a famous mystery writer. He mentioned that he, too, had young children, so I eagerly approached him after the event to ask how he managed to find time to write fiction with young children at home.
“I have a wife,” he said.
It's true: Even when women have partners or spouses, our significant others often send messages that they'd rather do something – anything – rather than take over child care and housework. It's easy to rant about this, to say that women's lives would be easier if men did their fair share around the house. However, even when our partners are willing to shoulder domestic duties in equal measure, we often get in our own way by refusing to let them. We want to read that bedtime story. We think we're the only ones who can pack the right school lunch. And we long to be the ones greeting the school bus in the afternoon if we can arrange our work schedules to do so.
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days. And, as the writer Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out, genius isn't a matter of genetics, but of opportunities and persistence: He estimates that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at doing something.
Nobody will give us those 10,000 hours. We have to take them for ourselves.
*
At the end of the week, we walk on St. Margaret's Beach. I'm in beachcomber mode, stooping to pick up stones that catch my eye. Susan wants to climb the cliffs. She hikes ahead of me and is soon clambering around on distant rocks, farther than I want to go without any shoes.
When I'm tired of picking up rocks, I decide to return to the car and get my book so that I can read until Susan returns. Then it dawns on me: she has my car keys.
For a moment, I'm irritated – why did she have to disappear like that? – and then I feel helpless. What will I do, all by myself on a beach, without even anything to read?
I sit on a boulder, disgruntled, and pile the rocks I've collected beside me. There's nothing to do but watch the waves wash in and out, frothy and pink on the red sand.
Watch the waves, and think. I remember another book signing I went to a long time ago. This one was by the political activist and short story writer Grace Paley. I asked her the same question that I'd asked the arrogant mystery writer: How did she find time to write with young children at home?
“Day care,” she said. “Don't ever be afraid to pay for writing time.”
Easier said than done. For most women, paying a babysitter so that they can write, paint, make pottery or dance is out of the question. Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce “only” art seems like a foolish decision.
What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority. Even if we aren't making great art, or commercial art, the very act of creating it is a joyful, transformative experience, one where we explore new emotions and perspectives, ideas and values.
I think hard about this while I sit on the beach. I think about the pages I've written this week, too, and about the way my novel is progressing.
And then, after a while, I'm not thinking much at all, just contentedly watching the force of the ocean, and how the waves make the rocks roll around and create such beautiful patterns in the smooth red sand. I build a little pyramid out of the rocks I've collected. I watch some pulpy kelp become draped over a rock, then wash out to sea again. I dig my toes deeper into the sand. I admire the swallows darting in and out of the cliff above me. My mind is clear.
I am just here. I am here, just me. Through writing, I have discovered a wonderfully still place inside me that I've never seen before. It's good to be here.
Eventually, of course, Susan returns from her walk. I write again that night, staying up until well past 2 a.m. solving a particularly vexing dilemma in the plot of my new novel. The images are fresh and there is tension on the page.
The drive back is lovely and uneventful. Our cell phones chorus again in the middle of New Brunswick, and by mid-coast Maine we've talked to all of our children. Everyone has survived.
We reach my house just before nine o'clock. “Well?” my husband asks. “How was it? Did you write anything you can sell?”
“I don't know,” I tell him. “I missed you,” I add.
I toss dirty clothes into the washing machine, clean the kitchen after dinner, check my email, walk the dogs, help my son order new parts for his scooter online. I make a grocery list.
During all of this, I can feel my brain starting to thrum with activity. The still place inside me has disappeared again. But at least I know how to get there, and who to call when I need help on the journey.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Turkeys, Boltholes, and Self-Sustainability
I live in a typical New England suburb: tall trees, a smattering of ranch houses, a few grand Colonials, a Cape or two. Yet, we still have our share of wild creatures, like the flock of turkeys I startled while walking my dogs, about a dozen prehistoric looking birds with gray wattles, brown feathers and clownishly large clawed feet.
As always, the turkeys proved to be as silly and indecisive as a flock of teenagers at the mall. As one started to dash across the road, two more followed. The others looked on anxiously, hesitant to make a run for it. This caused the three initially brave turkeys to question their own moxie and turn back partway, just as the first group decided to go for the gold and cross the road. Within a few seconds, all of the turkeys were milling around in the middle of the road, gobbling in distress.
The dogs and I finally moved forward. Turkeys scattered. As I watched them scramble up a bank, I thought about the book I'm reading, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. It's a great read, funny and edgy and informative. The author, Novella Carpenter http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/, describes how she created a garden in the middle of downtown Oakland, California on an abandoned patch of scrubby land. A central part of the narrative describes her decision to raise her own meat poultry. The first bird destined for the chopping block is a turkey named Harold, who she fattens up in anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner. I left off reading just as she was gathering Harold in her arms to bring him upstairs to the chopping block.
Seeing the turkeys this morning led me to wonder whether I could kill my own meat, and to ask myself why my family isn't more self-sufficient. I have a yard, enough land to grow vegetables, and there's no zoning in my neighborhood against raising chickens. Why don't I raise my own carrots and tomatoes? I could even have a stand of corn. And, if I'm willing to eat meat, shouldn't I also be willing to kill my own?
Thus far, I've rationalized my decision to buy every morsel I consume with this PC mantra: “I'm a busy working mom; I buy local; I recycle; I eat organic foods where it makes sense; I try not to eat much red meat;” etc. Hey, what more could any green-thinking progressive do?
I could raise my own food, that's what. I've been like Rip Van Winkle, sleepwalking my way through life. Yes, I drive a Honda with 155,600 miles on it and try to cook everything we eat instead of relying on packaged foods, but I'm newly awake and aware that I've become a lazy domestic animal accustomed to choosing from 514 brands of cereal on the grocery store shelves.
We've become a country where most of us take it for granted that food arrives on the table, as long as we can make the money to buy it. But making that money leads to lifestyles so far removed from the land that we never think about how much effort and energy it takes to produce what we eat.
This month, my husband and I made an offer on a small fixer-upper farmhouse with an acre of land and two barns on Prince Edward Island, Canada. We made the offer on a whim after seeing the house from the road and peering in its windows. The house has been abandoned for years; we're going up for a home inspection on Columbus Day weekend to see if the house will stand up until we can funnel the time and energy into it to make it a year-round home again.
PEI is a place where everything is about the weather, since the bulk of the Island's revenue comes from tourism and farming. Behind our house is a sheep farm, and across the street and on either side, the farmers raise wheat and potatoes.
Prince Edward Island is famous for its potatoes; the island produces over 20,000 pounds of potatoes each year, and over one-half of the island's total farm receipts came from potatoes alone in 2006 (www.peipotato.org). The island even has a potato museum http://www.peipotatomuseum.com/site/index.htm.
What could we grow on the island? Potatoes, surely. I'm guessing that an acre of land would be plenty for carrots and broccoli, tomatoes and chickens, fruit trees and whatever else we needed to sustain our own family, too.
My mother says this is crazy talk. She's thrilled to pay someone else to grow her food. She and my father lived through the depression; Mom's dad raised rabbits and chickens to get them through, and even when her parents came to live with us on the gerbil farm (http://www.authorhollyrobinson.com/), Grandfather insisted on having a half-acre vegetable garden, geese, sheep, and a flock of chickens. He and my grandmother froze, preserved, or canned everything we didn't eat over the summer and fall. He even made his own dandelion and apple wines.
“You never know when the world is going to end,” Grandfather joked, but of course to him it wasn't a joke.
It isn't a joke to us any more, either. The economists say that the recession ended a year ago. Ha! I don't know about you, but I must have slept through that, too. After walking the dogs and scaring the turkeys, I hopped in my car to drive to the gym. There was a bankruptcy notice on the gym door. A house down the road from us just went into foreclosure, and three other businesses in town have shuttered their doors. Several of my friends have been out of work for months. This is only small potatoes, so to speak, compared to what the midwest has faced; I drove through Ohio and Michigan last summer to visit my husband's family, and nearly every small town we drove through was a ghost town.
Yeah, I know I'm late, jumping on the self-sustainability bandwagon. I had college friends who were determined to go organic, get back to the land, dumpster dive, whatever. I made total fun of them. But now I think it's time for us to imagine a different life for ourselves.
What if? What if we could be more independent? What if we found a bolthole – Prince Edward Island, in our case – and figured out how to put food on the table ourselves? If Novella Carpenter can do it in Oakland, surely I can do it in rural Canada. I just need to quit being like those indecisive turkeys gobbling in the middle of the road.
As always, the turkeys proved to be as silly and indecisive as a flock of teenagers at the mall. As one started to dash across the road, two more followed. The others looked on anxiously, hesitant to make a run for it. This caused the three initially brave turkeys to question their own moxie and turn back partway, just as the first group decided to go for the gold and cross the road. Within a few seconds, all of the turkeys were milling around in the middle of the road, gobbling in distress.
The dogs and I finally moved forward. Turkeys scattered. As I watched them scramble up a bank, I thought about the book I'm reading, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. It's a great read, funny and edgy and informative. The author, Novella Carpenter http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/, describes how she created a garden in the middle of downtown Oakland, California on an abandoned patch of scrubby land. A central part of the narrative describes her decision to raise her own meat poultry. The first bird destined for the chopping block is a turkey named Harold, who she fattens up in anticipation of Thanksgiving dinner. I left off reading just as she was gathering Harold in her arms to bring him upstairs to the chopping block.
Seeing the turkeys this morning led me to wonder whether I could kill my own meat, and to ask myself why my family isn't more self-sufficient. I have a yard, enough land to grow vegetables, and there's no zoning in my neighborhood against raising chickens. Why don't I raise my own carrots and tomatoes? I could even have a stand of corn. And, if I'm willing to eat meat, shouldn't I also be willing to kill my own?
Thus far, I've rationalized my decision to buy every morsel I consume with this PC mantra: “I'm a busy working mom; I buy local; I recycle; I eat organic foods where it makes sense; I try not to eat much red meat;” etc. Hey, what more could any green-thinking progressive do?
I could raise my own food, that's what. I've been like Rip Van Winkle, sleepwalking my way through life. Yes, I drive a Honda with 155,600 miles on it and try to cook everything we eat instead of relying on packaged foods, but I'm newly awake and aware that I've become a lazy domestic animal accustomed to choosing from 514 brands of cereal on the grocery store shelves.
We've become a country where most of us take it for granted that food arrives on the table, as long as we can make the money to buy it. But making that money leads to lifestyles so far removed from the land that we never think about how much effort and energy it takes to produce what we eat.
This month, my husband and I made an offer on a small fixer-upper farmhouse with an acre of land and two barns on Prince Edward Island, Canada. We made the offer on a whim after seeing the house from the road and peering in its windows. The house has been abandoned for years; we're going up for a home inspection on Columbus Day weekend to see if the house will stand up until we can funnel the time and energy into it to make it a year-round home again.
PEI is a place where everything is about the weather, since the bulk of the Island's revenue comes from tourism and farming. Behind our house is a sheep farm, and across the street and on either side, the farmers raise wheat and potatoes.
Prince Edward Island is famous for its potatoes; the island produces over 20,000 pounds of potatoes each year, and over one-half of the island's total farm receipts came from potatoes alone in 2006 (www.peipotato.org). The island even has a potato museum http://www.peipotatomuseum.com/site/index.htm.
What could we grow on the island? Potatoes, surely. I'm guessing that an acre of land would be plenty for carrots and broccoli, tomatoes and chickens, fruit trees and whatever else we needed to sustain our own family, too.
My mother says this is crazy talk. She's thrilled to pay someone else to grow her food. She and my father lived through the depression; Mom's dad raised rabbits and chickens to get them through, and even when her parents came to live with us on the gerbil farm (http://www.authorhollyrobinson.com/), Grandfather insisted on having a half-acre vegetable garden, geese, sheep, and a flock of chickens. He and my grandmother froze, preserved, or canned everything we didn't eat over the summer and fall. He even made his own dandelion and apple wines.
“You never know when the world is going to end,” Grandfather joked, but of course to him it wasn't a joke.
It isn't a joke to us any more, either. The economists say that the recession ended a year ago. Ha! I don't know about you, but I must have slept through that, too. After walking the dogs and scaring the turkeys, I hopped in my car to drive to the gym. There was a bankruptcy notice on the gym door. A house down the road from us just went into foreclosure, and three other businesses in town have shuttered their doors. Several of my friends have been out of work for months. This is only small potatoes, so to speak, compared to what the midwest has faced; I drove through Ohio and Michigan last summer to visit my husband's family, and nearly every small town we drove through was a ghost town.
Yeah, I know I'm late, jumping on the self-sustainability bandwagon. I had college friends who were determined to go organic, get back to the land, dumpster dive, whatever. I made total fun of them. But now I think it's time for us to imagine a different life for ourselves.
What if? What if we could be more independent? What if we found a bolthole – Prince Edward Island, in our case – and figured out how to put food on the table ourselves? If Novella Carpenter can do it in Oakland, surely I can do it in rural Canada. I just need to quit being like those indecisive turkeys gobbling in the middle of the road.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Do College Costs + Retirement = Canada?
“So how long do you plan to keep working?” asked a friend recently, after he'd waxed poetic about his own crafty retirement plan (take his pension at 65, sell his Massachusetts house and move to Florida, play tennis year-round, live happily ever after).
“Um. Forever?” I suggested. “I plan to die at my keyboard.”
I wasn't joking. Between the economic free fall and putting kids through college, my husband and I will be working for the rest of our lives.
That's why we made an offer on a house in Canada yesterday.
Why Canada? I've loved Prince Edward Island, Canada, ever since I started vacationing there some fifteen years ago. The island is gorgeous (see photos at http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-892-s&va=prince+edward+island+canada), laid back, friendly, green-minded, and there's fiddle music everywhere you go. It felt like home the first moment I hiked the red dirt roads between flowering potato fields.
“Yes, that's fine, but what about the winter?” various friends countered, so I tried traveling to PEI then, too, and found other things to love, like the ice fishing shacks stacked like bright Legos along Malpeque Bay and the snow tornadoes rising like long-skirted fairies in the fields.
But I digress. We made an offer on a house located in the remote eastern corner of PEI because there's no way that my husband and I can afford to retire here in the U.S. We haven't seen the inside of the house – there was no realtor around, and we had to leave the next day – but we peered into the windows from the rotted deck, and we'd seen the listing sheet online. We know that this farmhouse supposedly has five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
We also know that the house is being sold “as is.” That's a little scary, because Canadian realtors tend to be honest to a fault. When I surf www.mls.ca with these simple criteria: “Prince Edward Island, $25,000 to $75,000 price range, two bedrooms or more,” I regularly read descriptions like these: “This house has been neglected. Needs a strong arm.” Or, “Small country home that has been left vacant for a few years. Needs a real clean up. The property has no source of heat. Had a wood stove and previous owner took it.”
With this particular house, the phrase that struck me was this one: “Being sold with furnishings and other items too numerous to mention.” What happened to the owner, I wondered, that he would flee or fade away without emptying his house?
Finally, I called our realtor, Anne. She's a trim, no-nonsense woman who used to make her living fishing for lobster; last summer, she showed me a few houses while wearing knee-high green rubber boots. “I don't know where the old fella went that lived there,” she said, “but I can call his nephew down the road and find out more if you're interested.”
That's how the island works: if you know one person, you know six, without any degrees of separation. When Anne called back, though, she couldn't tell me much. Apparently this was an estate sale, someone's children selling it for someone who had died. The “old fella,” presumably.
“What about the septic system?” I asked.
“Doubt anybody knows much about that,” Anne said.
“How do I know if I'd have to replace it?”
“Guess you'd have to just dig it up,” she said. “But I wouldn't recommend it. You might want to leave it be.”
“You mean we'd just buy the house, and hope for the best?” I asked.
“That's about the size of things,” she said. “If it fails, you'd know it.”
This did not sound promising. On the other hand, if the old fella hadn't been using the septic system in a while, everything probably had time to drain.
So we made the offer, and now we're waiting to see if it was accepted. We'll find out this Friday. Meanwhile, I'm biting my nails.
Despite the fact that we love PEI – and this house, in particular, with its charming century-old architecture, peaceful farmland views, and proximity to our favorite beach – I know that this plan is more whimsical than logical. For starters, we have no money. Like so many people, we were nearly flattened by the economic downturn. My husband was laid off twice and two of the start-up companies he joined went under. We struggled to stay afloat as our oldest child started college and we paid health care costs out of pocket for one year, then a second. We finally decided to sell our house and buy a smaller one.
That's when the real estate market crashed. Our first buyer pulled a runner after we'd gotten locked into buying that smaller house, so we ended up with a bridge loan for a year, until we found another buyer. Goodbye, savings. Hello, credit cards.
With no spare cash under our mattress, we'll now have to dip into our retirement funds to finance the purchase of this house. Yet another bad idea: Why take a 10 percent hit, rather than wait until we're old enough to pull the money out without having to pay taxes on it?
Our only arguments in favor of doing so are admittedly weak: our retirement funds are stagnating with the limp stock market, making us think real estate can't be worse, and the PEI house we want to buy is one that we can easily imagine loving full-time. Plus, it's for sale right now at an asking price that's half of its assessed value.
“Prince Edward Island is too far away,” another friend complains. “Why can't you find a retirement spot closer to home?”
Where could we go? Ohio? Pennsylvania? Tennessee? Even those states are more expensive. We're not alone in thinking that Canada is the answer. Far from it: the number of U.S. citizens choosing to live in Canada hit a 30-year high recently (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2101397c-fe7c-4adf-a2d1-8665cb29ac66&k=0
The last time Canada saw such an enormous influx of U.S. citizens was during the political turmoil of the Vietnam war. Now, many are choosing Canada both for economic and political reasons. Our own reasons are simple: we love Canada, and the cost of living in the U.S. has killed us. Once our kids are grown, we imagine eventually selling this house in New England, which is about the same size as the one on PEI but worth ten times more. We'll have red dirt roads and fiddle music, potato fields and freshly steamed mussels to keep us happy. We'll still be working until we drop to pay back our debts. But we can freelance remotely for the same U.S. companies from Canada – my husband as a software engineer, me as a writer – while we make goat cheese, have a few hens of our own, and grow our own vegetables, all without a crippling mortgage and punishing health care costs.
It's a crazy dream. But it's less of a fiscal nightmare than what we've experienced here.
Or am I missing something? Should we back out of this house deal now, while there's still time to be sensible?
“Um. Forever?” I suggested. “I plan to die at my keyboard.”
I wasn't joking. Between the economic free fall and putting kids through college, my husband and I will be working for the rest of our lives.
That's why we made an offer on a house in Canada yesterday.
Why Canada? I've loved Prince Edward Island, Canada, ever since I started vacationing there some fifteen years ago. The island is gorgeous (see photos at http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?_adv_prop=image&fr=yfp-t-892-s&va=prince+edward+island+canada), laid back, friendly, green-minded, and there's fiddle music everywhere you go. It felt like home the first moment I hiked the red dirt roads between flowering potato fields.
“Yes, that's fine, but what about the winter?” various friends countered, so I tried traveling to PEI then, too, and found other things to love, like the ice fishing shacks stacked like bright Legos along Malpeque Bay and the snow tornadoes rising like long-skirted fairies in the fields.
But I digress. We made an offer on a house located in the remote eastern corner of PEI because there's no way that my husband and I can afford to retire here in the U.S. We haven't seen the inside of the house – there was no realtor around, and we had to leave the next day – but we peered into the windows from the rotted deck, and we'd seen the listing sheet online. We know that this farmhouse supposedly has five bedrooms and two bathrooms.
We also know that the house is being sold “as is.” That's a little scary, because Canadian realtors tend to be honest to a fault. When I surf www.mls.ca with these simple criteria: “Prince Edward Island, $25,000 to $75,000 price range, two bedrooms or more,” I regularly read descriptions like these: “This house has been neglected. Needs a strong arm.” Or, “Small country home that has been left vacant for a few years. Needs a real clean up. The property has no source of heat. Had a wood stove and previous owner took it.”
With this particular house, the phrase that struck me was this one: “Being sold with furnishings and other items too numerous to mention.” What happened to the owner, I wondered, that he would flee or fade away without emptying his house?
Finally, I called our realtor, Anne. She's a trim, no-nonsense woman who used to make her living fishing for lobster; last summer, she showed me a few houses while wearing knee-high green rubber boots. “I don't know where the old fella went that lived there,” she said, “but I can call his nephew down the road and find out more if you're interested.”
That's how the island works: if you know one person, you know six, without any degrees of separation. When Anne called back, though, she couldn't tell me much. Apparently this was an estate sale, someone's children selling it for someone who had died. The “old fella,” presumably.
“What about the septic system?” I asked.
“Doubt anybody knows much about that,” Anne said.
“How do I know if I'd have to replace it?”
“Guess you'd have to just dig it up,” she said. “But I wouldn't recommend it. You might want to leave it be.”
“You mean we'd just buy the house, and hope for the best?” I asked.
“That's about the size of things,” she said. “If it fails, you'd know it.”
This did not sound promising. On the other hand, if the old fella hadn't been using the septic system in a while, everything probably had time to drain.
So we made the offer, and now we're waiting to see if it was accepted. We'll find out this Friday. Meanwhile, I'm biting my nails.
Despite the fact that we love PEI – and this house, in particular, with its charming century-old architecture, peaceful farmland views, and proximity to our favorite beach – I know that this plan is more whimsical than logical. For starters, we have no money. Like so many people, we were nearly flattened by the economic downturn. My husband was laid off twice and two of the start-up companies he joined went under. We struggled to stay afloat as our oldest child started college and we paid health care costs out of pocket for one year, then a second. We finally decided to sell our house and buy a smaller one.
That's when the real estate market crashed. Our first buyer pulled a runner after we'd gotten locked into buying that smaller house, so we ended up with a bridge loan for a year, until we found another buyer. Goodbye, savings. Hello, credit cards.
With no spare cash under our mattress, we'll now have to dip into our retirement funds to finance the purchase of this house. Yet another bad idea: Why take a 10 percent hit, rather than wait until we're old enough to pull the money out without having to pay taxes on it?
Our only arguments in favor of doing so are admittedly weak: our retirement funds are stagnating with the limp stock market, making us think real estate can't be worse, and the PEI house we want to buy is one that we can easily imagine loving full-time. Plus, it's for sale right now at an asking price that's half of its assessed value.
“Prince Edward Island is too far away,” another friend complains. “Why can't you find a retirement spot closer to home?”
Where could we go? Ohio? Pennsylvania? Tennessee? Even those states are more expensive. We're not alone in thinking that Canada is the answer. Far from it: the number of U.S. citizens choosing to live in Canada hit a 30-year high recently (http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2101397c-fe7c-4adf-a2d1-8665cb29ac66&k=0
The last time Canada saw such an enormous influx of U.S. citizens was during the political turmoil of the Vietnam war. Now, many are choosing Canada both for economic and political reasons. Our own reasons are simple: we love Canada, and the cost of living in the U.S. has killed us. Once our kids are grown, we imagine eventually selling this house in New England, which is about the same size as the one on PEI but worth ten times more. We'll have red dirt roads and fiddle music, potato fields and freshly steamed mussels to keep us happy. We'll still be working until we drop to pay back our debts. But we can freelance remotely for the same U.S. companies from Canada – my husband as a software engineer, me as a writer – while we make goat cheese, have a few hens of our own, and grow our own vegetables, all without a crippling mortgage and punishing health care costs.
It's a crazy dream. But it's less of a fiscal nightmare than what we've experienced here.
Or am I missing something? Should we back out of this house deal now, while there's still time to be sensible?
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Is the Grass Greener in Canada?
I was vacationing in Prince Edward Island, Canada this summer when I came across this article in The Globe and Mail: “The World Would Love to Be Canadian” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/news/the-world-would-love-to-be-canadian/article1612707/). The writer, Joe Friesen, cites this startling statistic: “Given the choice, 53 percent of adults in the world's 24 leading economies said they would immigrate to Canada.”
I'm teetering on the edge of joining them.
This isn't a whimsical decision on my part. It's been brewing since 1974, when my father took our family on our one and only camping trip. He rented an RV and we headed north from Massachusetts to Prince Edward Island, which he described as “a peaceful emerald isle of enchantment, where the sands are red and the waters sparkle silver.” Dad had never read Anne of Green Gables (http://www.anneofgreengables.com/), but he made PEI sound tantalizing, like the Land of Oz without the Wicked Witch and her horrible flying monkeys.
Sadly, my mother did not take to camping. “Just more chores for me!” she declared, and forced us to turn around in Maine after driving a grand total of four hours. My parents were divorced soon after that.
Fast forward to my own divorce. When my first husband and I split up, I had two young children; I was dead set on giving them a family vacation, man or no man. Affording a beach vacation in New England was impossible on my single-parent salary, so I convinced a friend and her kids to join us on a week-long trip to Prince Edward Island after spotting an ad for a cottage there that rented for just $400 a week.
We drove twelve hours north from Massachusetts with our kids making more noise in that van than most rock concerts. Between the various stops to pee and feed them all, it was midnight by the time we reached the island. (In those days, the only way to get to PEI was the ferry.) The cottage was on a rutted red dirt road (still plenty of those up there, for all of you Anne of Green Gables fans). I was shaking with fatigue by the time we arrived. It was pitch black all around us, but the sky was a bowl of stars and we could smell the sea.
We woke the next morning to the sound of fiddle music. I sat up and looked out my window at Rustico Bay, where great blue herons dotted the shore. Tall purple and pink lupins waved like some Disney cartoon animation; I half expected the flowers to sing. Across the bay was a tall white church, and that's where the fiddle music was coming from: a festival that we attended that very afternoon. I was hooked on PEI from that moment on.
I've gone back to Prince Edward Island every summer for the past 14 years, and sometimes in the fall or even winter, when the snow blows across the potato fields and the roads disappear out from under you. There is never a time when I don't love it.
Yes, there are certainly moments while driving up Route 95 through Maine (where the State motto should be “Maine, the Infinite State”) when I think, “This is so not worth it.” Even in New Brunswick, where I've come to love the Bay of Fundy's rocky shoreline and the long stretches of farmland with their big brown loaves of hay and spotted cows, I sometimes think, “Why can't I find a closer place to love?” Then I cross the Confederation Bridge from the mainland to Prince Edward Island and fall in love with the place all over again. The colors seem brighter and the air is clearer here than anywhere else on earth.
The Globe and Mail article reports that more than three-quarters of those surveyed in China said they'd prefer to live in Canada, followed by Mexico and India at nearly 70 percent. Most respondents perceived Canada as a place where rights and freedoms are respected on a deeper level than anywhere else.
Is this true? By now, I've explored most parts of Canada, including many of its cities, from Vancouver to Ottawa, from Montreal to St. John. There is urban blight, as there is in the U.S., and visible evidence of unemployment – the Canadian unemployment rate is just over 8 percent overall. Certainly Canada isn't free of crime or substance abuse. The last time I was in St. John with my mother, one drunken spacey fellow stepped onto the escalator behind Mom and rested his chin on her shoulder, passing out for a second until she barked at him to back off.
Yet, wherever I've been in Canada, there is an overall feeling of goodwill from most people – my husband calls most Canadians “pathologically friendly” because of their willingness to chat you up – and generosity abounds. Most recently, I was staying at a friend's house on PEI when another friend brought her bike over for my husband to pump up the tire. Within minutes, we were joined by two other neighbors, both asking if we needed help. They stayed for an hour.
Three years ago, my brother and I went in on a small summer cottage on PEI. It's a typical cottage, mostly porch, overlooking Malpeque Bay. I bought it online, sight unseen, and we've camped out in it happily every summer, renting out empty weeks to help sustain the costs of having an extra house. This summer, I spotted the perfect year-round house for sale in the more remote eastern part of the island, near our favorite beach. Now we're trying to decide whether to buy that one as well. This sounds luxurious, even decadent, this idea of having second homes – but neither costs more than most new cars here.
If we bought the farmhouse, I imagine one day retiring there with my second husband, or living there half of every year after the last of our five kids is off to college. I dream of raising alpacas and selling the wool; my husband is arguing on behalf of goats and cheese-making. Both are pipe dreams at this point. Sensibly, we'd probably do better just doing what we do now: writing and software engineering. But it's the simplicity of having a ramshackle farmhouse on Prince Edward Island that lures us – and the good neighbors I know we'd find there.
Should we, or shouldn't we, go for this dream? Am I fooling myself about Canada because the news headlines here are so awful (think war, oil spills, harsh immigration legislation)? Is it a purely escapist impulse, the kind we all have when fantasizing about living in our favorite vacation spots, that makes me want to flee north of the border? Or is Canada really a better place to live?
I'm teetering on the edge of joining them.
This isn't a whimsical decision on my part. It's been brewing since 1974, when my father took our family on our one and only camping trip. He rented an RV and we headed north from Massachusetts to Prince Edward Island, which he described as “a peaceful emerald isle of enchantment, where the sands are red and the waters sparkle silver.” Dad had never read Anne of Green Gables (http://www.anneofgreengables.com/), but he made PEI sound tantalizing, like the Land of Oz without the Wicked Witch and her horrible flying monkeys.
Sadly, my mother did not take to camping. “Just more chores for me!” she declared, and forced us to turn around in Maine after driving a grand total of four hours. My parents were divorced soon after that.
Fast forward to my own divorce. When my first husband and I split up, I had two young children; I was dead set on giving them a family vacation, man or no man. Affording a beach vacation in New England was impossible on my single-parent salary, so I convinced a friend and her kids to join us on a week-long trip to Prince Edward Island after spotting an ad for a cottage there that rented for just $400 a week.
We drove twelve hours north from Massachusetts with our kids making more noise in that van than most rock concerts. Between the various stops to pee and feed them all, it was midnight by the time we reached the island. (In those days, the only way to get to PEI was the ferry.) The cottage was on a rutted red dirt road (still plenty of those up there, for all of you Anne of Green Gables fans). I was shaking with fatigue by the time we arrived. It was pitch black all around us, but the sky was a bowl of stars and we could smell the sea.
We woke the next morning to the sound of fiddle music. I sat up and looked out my window at Rustico Bay, where great blue herons dotted the shore. Tall purple and pink lupins waved like some Disney cartoon animation; I half expected the flowers to sing. Across the bay was a tall white church, and that's where the fiddle music was coming from: a festival that we attended that very afternoon. I was hooked on PEI from that moment on.
I've gone back to Prince Edward Island every summer for the past 14 years, and sometimes in the fall or even winter, when the snow blows across the potato fields and the roads disappear out from under you. There is never a time when I don't love it.
Yes, there are certainly moments while driving up Route 95 through Maine (where the State motto should be “Maine, the Infinite State”) when I think, “This is so not worth it.” Even in New Brunswick, where I've come to love the Bay of Fundy's rocky shoreline and the long stretches of farmland with their big brown loaves of hay and spotted cows, I sometimes think, “Why can't I find a closer place to love?” Then I cross the Confederation Bridge from the mainland to Prince Edward Island and fall in love with the place all over again. The colors seem brighter and the air is clearer here than anywhere else on earth.
The Globe and Mail article reports that more than three-quarters of those surveyed in China said they'd prefer to live in Canada, followed by Mexico and India at nearly 70 percent. Most respondents perceived Canada as a place where rights and freedoms are respected on a deeper level than anywhere else.
Is this true? By now, I've explored most parts of Canada, including many of its cities, from Vancouver to Ottawa, from Montreal to St. John. There is urban blight, as there is in the U.S., and visible evidence of unemployment – the Canadian unemployment rate is just over 8 percent overall. Certainly Canada isn't free of crime or substance abuse. The last time I was in St. John with my mother, one drunken spacey fellow stepped onto the escalator behind Mom and rested his chin on her shoulder, passing out for a second until she barked at him to back off.
Yet, wherever I've been in Canada, there is an overall feeling of goodwill from most people – my husband calls most Canadians “pathologically friendly” because of their willingness to chat you up – and generosity abounds. Most recently, I was staying at a friend's house on PEI when another friend brought her bike over for my husband to pump up the tire. Within minutes, we were joined by two other neighbors, both asking if we needed help. They stayed for an hour.
Three years ago, my brother and I went in on a small summer cottage on PEI. It's a typical cottage, mostly porch, overlooking Malpeque Bay. I bought it online, sight unseen, and we've camped out in it happily every summer, renting out empty weeks to help sustain the costs of having an extra house. This summer, I spotted the perfect year-round house for sale in the more remote eastern part of the island, near our favorite beach. Now we're trying to decide whether to buy that one as well. This sounds luxurious, even decadent, this idea of having second homes – but neither costs more than most new cars here.
If we bought the farmhouse, I imagine one day retiring there with my second husband, or living there half of every year after the last of our five kids is off to college. I dream of raising alpacas and selling the wool; my husband is arguing on behalf of goats and cheese-making. Both are pipe dreams at this point. Sensibly, we'd probably do better just doing what we do now: writing and software engineering. But it's the simplicity of having a ramshackle farmhouse on Prince Edward Island that lures us – and the good neighbors I know we'd find there.
Should we, or shouldn't we, go for this dream? Am I fooling myself about Canada because the news headlines here are so awful (think war, oil spills, harsh immigration legislation)? Is it a purely escapist impulse, the kind we all have when fantasizing about living in our favorite vacation spots, that makes me want to flee north of the border? Or is Canada really a better place to live?
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